A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DUNK
CHAPTER II: HOMO DUNKILIS
After countless ages of struggle under the constricting yoke of sub-intelligence, a certain order of mammals known as the hominids developed a dim intelligence within the dark caverns of their skulls. The stage was set not only for the development of tools and the creation of complex social structures, but also for dunking. These would be the first beings on earth to dunk a ball with purpose rather than by accident, although they did not know it at the time. They did not know much of anything. Despite possessing intelligence greater than any living thing before them, they were surprisingly stupid.
(It goes without saying that the intelligential pecking order established five million years ago has gone mostly unchallenged, and no representative from the bird, fish, or reptile families has yet developed the understanding necessary to execute a slam dunk in the commonly accepted definition of the phrase.)
The first purposeful dunk in human history occurred well before systems of language or writing were anything more than a spark in a prehistoric synapse. Two male hominids (since they were nameless, they are called Bog and Drog here for clarity) were scavenging for food when they came to a deep pit. It occurred to Bog that the pit was deep enough that if any animal had fallen in, the animal would have been trapped and perhaps easier to kill. To test the deepness of the hole, and thus the safety of entering it, he picked up a nearby rock and dropped it in. As Drog’s lesser intellect struggled to make sense of his companion’s actions, the rock made an audible thunking sound two seconds later.
Bog continued on his way, not yet having any strategy for entering a pit too deep to climb out of. Drog, ever the lapdog, followed obediently. Neither was aware that Bog had just completed the first slam dunk ever, that he had just written the first entry in the ledger of mankind’s slam dunks. Since this was before the introduction of the three-point line, the dunk was worth two points, but neither Drog nor Bog were aware of this, either, despite their ability to do rudimentary addition. Bog led the game 2-0 until he was mauled by a tiger eight months later.
In this way, the idea of the “slam dunk”, which had existed before even the Big Bang brought about the era of matter, became not just an idea, but a concrete action.
A few weeks later and a few hundred miles away, a conflict between two tribes of hominids resulted in a severed head of an opposing tribe member being dropped in the firepit of his tribe in an act of intimidation. This was also a dunk, but it was not as cool because somebody else had done it first.
The act of putting a round object inside a ring-shaped object was surprisingly infrequent in those early days, and thousands of years would pass between dunks. Of course, in the evolutionary timeline, a thousand years is not very many years. Humanity’s progress in this endeavor would have been painfully slow to an observer, but, to our credit, we progressed much more readily than competing intelligences in other galaxies. Outlaying exactly the nature of those intelligences would be an unwise use of one’s time. It is enough to know that, while humans on earth did not dunk very often during the Pleistocene period, the inhabitants of other planets were even more clueless than we were.
By the time Homo Sapiens emerged a million years ago, the species had branched out to several other worthy avocations, but the development of a sport based around dunking was still a very, very long time away. In fact, it would be almost as long before humans could waste time engaging in recreational activities; simply trying (and usually failing) to survive was a time-consuming task which tolerated no breaks.
In the next chapter, we will skip ahead to the era of what we might call “modern” humans and explore the nature of their dunks.
TO BE CONTINUED